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Industrial giant Siemens plans to tap into Canadian battery research talent and the country’s nascent electric vehicle ecosystem to improve how batteries are designed and manufactured.
The company committed $150 million on March 31 to establish its global R&D hub for battery production in Canada. The money will be spent over five years, beginning with investments in staff, equipment and software at both Siemens’ Canadian headquarters in Oakville, Ont., and in nearby Kitchener-Waterloo.
While Siemens isn’t in the business of building batteries, it can provide the industrial know-how to perfect the process, said Joris Myny, senior vice-president of digital industries at Siemens Canada.
Global battery makers have generally pursued production improvements through trial and error, but as the battery and EV markets go mainstream, a more thoughtful approach to optimization is needed, he told Automotive News Canada.
“We have entered the mass serial production of batteries and there are certain criteria that have to be met to produce in [a] profitable way, and that requires data processing using artificial intelligence.”
Myny pointed to high scrap rates at battery manufacturing plants, an issue that results in added costs from wasted product, as one example.
“Getting those scrap rates under control is a matter of life and death for those companies. Quality consistency is a must-have in serial production. It has to be right every time.”
Siemens battery research hub will focus on reducing scrap, along with other key manufacturing benchmarks, such as product consistency, quality and workforce efficiency. Advances in all these areas require thorough preproduction simulation, data collection on the shop floor and the use of artificial intelligence to drive process improvements — all areas Siemens is equipped to lend assistance, Myny said.
Canada beat other regions in bid to host Siemens hub
Germany, the United States and Asia were in the running to host the Siemens battery R&D centre, Myny said, but several attributes “tilted the decision towards Canada.”
The country’s strong foundation of university-based battery researchers and crop of skilled students were “really, really important factors,” Myny said. The country’s growing battery ecosystem anchored by several big-name investors, federal and provincial government commitments to the industry and Canada’s ability to produce batteries using clean power were a few of the other differentiators, he added.